Good grief. Tell him to stop.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Author: Greg Swann (page 113 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
One of the benefits of The Odysseus Medal competition, for me, personally — especially since we started echoing the Long List of nominees — is that I don’t feel as much pressure to weigh in on every last thing. I’ve been writing software in my spare moments for the last two weeks, and, amazingly enough, the world spins on without me. Last week we had Roost.com launch, which I wrote about, but we also had a huge Fed rate cut and the extended coverage of the Ummel lawsuit, and I got to coast on both stories, on the strength of the great work done by other voices in the RE.net.
And, as it works out, this week is an all-Ummel Odysseus Medal Awards post.
We start with Glenn Kelmann, who wins The Odysseus Medal this week for “114 Pounds of Absolute Perserverance”:
Once a buyer’s agent begins making representations about price, it seems possible for him to make negligent representations about price. This doesn’t mean an agent can’t make representations about price, and can’t be wrong when he does. He just can’t be negligently wrong, by withholding material information that a reasonable person would want to see. If the Ummels’ agent did that, he should pay for it.
Of course, since we have no idea from our seat in the peanut gallery what really happened between Ms. Ummel and her agent, the whole debate is academic. The only undeniable fact is that the lawsuit that Ms. Ummel is pursuing, at greater cost than she is likely to recoup, must be like all other forms of revenge, a hopeless attempt to regain what she lost: her sense of trust and self-reliance.
In this respect, the case just illustrates the perils to both parties when a client outsources her brain to a real estate agent, or a stock-broker, or anyone else trying to sell something. It is why we dislike the paternalistic mindset occasionally used to justify brokerage fees, in which talk of “hand holding” is not seen as condescending, fears about “the single biggest purchase in your life” are stoked, and agent attempts to be persuasive during Read more
There are 18 entries on the short list this week, out of a long list of 78 posts. A lot of news, so a longer short-list. Upside: A boatload of fascinating reading.
Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
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“Brian Brady — Erin Brockovich Watch Out! Here Comes Erin Brockovich!“,
“Brian Brady — Guerilla Warfare Needed Housevalues.com Invades Activerain.com: Guerilla Warfare Needed“,
“Brian Brady — Ultimate Irony Activerain.com and HouseValues.com- The Ultimate Irony“,
“Brian Brady — Brokers/Lenders The Danger of Real Estate Brokers as Loan Advisors“,
“Charles Feldman — Litigious Clients Real Estate Agents: Are Litigious Clients Out to Get YOU?“,
“Dan Green — Mortgage Rates and the Fed Why Mortgage Rates Didn’t Fall More When The Fed Made A Surprise 0.750% Rate Cut“,
“Doug Quance — Self-Fufilling Prophecy And Now We Shall Witness The Economic Self-Fufilling Prophecy“,
“Dustin Luther — Roost.com Who gave Roost complete MLS listings?“,
“Galen Ward — Benefit versus Features Descriptive text as benefit, not feature“,
“Glenn Kelman — Absolute Perserverance “114 Pounds of Absolute Perserverance”“,
“Jay Thompson — Buyer suing realtor On Buyers Suing Agents“,
“Jay Thompson — Roost.com Roost.com: A New Player in Real Estate Search“,
“Jim Cronin — Slow-Loading 3 Reasons Your Real Estate Blog Loads So Darn Slow, and the Solutions“,
“Joel Burslem — Roost.com Roost.com Kicks over the RE Search Cart“,
“Kris Berg — The Fast Lane Real Estate in the Fast Lane“,
“Michael Wurzer — Branded or Unbranded Media Branded or Unbranded Media, A Video Conundrum“,
“Mike Price — Who Rules The Roost? Who Rules The Roost?“,
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Deadline for next week’s competition Read more
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Selling your home in a declining market? The race is to the swift
If you’re chasing the market down, chances are you’ll never catch it. The trick to pricing a home for sale is to race the market down.
How’s that again? We’re in a declining market, that’s understood. It won’t be this way forever, but prices could continue their slow leak for quite a while longer.
What that means is that, whatever price you might get for your home today, you will probably get still less a month from now or three months from now.
Hence, you need to make a difficult decision.
If you don’t actually need to sell right now, you might do better putting your move off for two or three years.
But suppose instead that you do need to sell your house right now. You have a job offer out of town. You have a big deposit on a new home. You’re expecting triplets. What now?
Even in the best of markets, sellers can have an inflated idea of the value of their homes. This has certainly been the case in the two years since the market turned. We’ve had a glut of inventory, but much of that has been overpriced inventory.
Typically, the seller starts out with the price too high, then tries to chase the market down with a series of price reductions — usually too little and too late.
If your house is not showing, it cannot sell. But if it isn’t showing, this almost always means it is overpriced. The trick to getting it sold now is to price it under the competitive listings.
The natural impetus, in the face of advice like this, is to say, “I don’t want to give my house away!”
Who can blame you for feeling that way? But the important question is, “Would you rather hang onto it for a few more months, and then sell it for even less — if you are able to sell it at all?”
Racing the market down can be a painful decision. But the pain is likely to be Read more
Nota bene: Slightly amended. Reread carefully.
I landed on Jeff Kempe’s weblog yesterday. In the way of the web, I don’t remember how I got there or why I came. But I spent a little while looking around, without quite realizing what I was looking for.
And then it hit me: There’s no contact information. No phone number. No “email me!” link. No contact form. You can find Jeff’s phone number on the About page, but that’s about it.
Maybe he wants it that way. Maybe it’s none of my business. And maybe I’m not so religious about this stuff that I can go out look for motes — or even beams. But Brian Brady is dead-on when he talks about asking for the business, so I decided to do something for Jeff, whether he likes it or not.
And: You can play, too.
What I came up with is a sort of universal contact form for real estate webloggers.
You can see how it looks on DistinctivePhoenix.com in the image to the right. It’s built to adopt the look-and-feel imposed by your weblog’s theme’s CSS file, so it should look just right when you deploy it. I deliberately made it narrow because sidebars can be pretty tight places.
The code itself is pretty simple, so if you feel comfortable editing PHP, you can go in and modify it to your heart’s content.
But if the thought of editing software makes your brain ache, you can deploy this form by editing only five lines of code, all very simple.
First, you have to email me to get me to send you the form. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to get a PHP file to download from our server without executing. I can email you a zip file, but our anonymous FTP is so anonymous I can’t figure out its true name.
Anyway, when you get the PHP file, you’re going to do this — in a text editor, not in Microsoft Word: Edit the second through the fifth lines. They’ll start out looking like this:
$myName = "Firstname Lastname"; $myCompany = "The Almagamated ClusterFunk Team"; $myEmailAddress = "MyEmailAddress@MyFileServer.com"; $myWeblogAddress = Read more
What if somebody built a Realty.bot that seemed to make sense from Day 1? What kind of goof-ball strategy is that in the wacky world of Web 2.0?
I don’t know if Roost.com really has a business to bank on. The search.bot horizons are starting to look a little crowded. But unlike past entrants, the company is entering the field with two unprecedented features: They’re working from real MLS listings, via member-brokers’ IDX feeds, and they actually have a strategy for monetizing their efforts.
Yawn! YAMBS again? That’s Yet-Another-Map-Based-Search, a transition in the course of two years from the cool to the commonplace. I haven’t been able to play with Roost.com yet, but my guess would be that they’re behind the curve on cool-factors. The search tools seem to be more than adequate, but Roost is all about search, with none of the social-theater-of-the-mind games the older Realty.bots have been rolling out.
This is nothing but residential real estate search, with 13 major markets being served at today’s roll-out. Since the listings come from IDX feeds, Roost.com needs at least one broker relationship for every MLS system it wants to service.
There’s more. Roost.com plans to make money by delivering prospects back to member brokers on a Cost-Per-Click basis. In one scenario, as in the screen-shot above, the broker can have his own private-label Roost.com IDX system hosted on a third-level-domain — e.g., tarbell.roost.com. Every click originating on that site would go back to Tarbell.
Alternatively, brokers can participate directly on the Roost.com system, with the end-user click-throughs being distributed in a manner similar to Google’s Adwords program: Participating brokers would be selected at random based on their desired spending goals.
I’m eager to play with the system, because what I’ve seen of it so far seems cool. As an example, the image below shows a windolet of photos. You can have more than one of these open at one time, so you can compare photos from multiple properties.
Roost.com is essentially a free IDX system for brokers that they would only have to pay for when they are receiving benefits from it — this in the form Read more
The Odysseus Medal this week goes to Trevor Smith for Theology, Postmodernism, and a Different Kind of Buyer:
– Postmodernism places value on the journey. Many of my clients are very interested in learning about the process of real estate. They don’t want somebody to do it for them. They want to be part of the journey. They want to be an integral cog in the process, so that when they get the house they want, they can say “I took part, in buying this home.” Contrast this to agent/client relationships of the past where the agent decided what homes to show their client, they drafted the paperwork and said “sign here,” and they moved their client through closing with directions rather than explanations.
– Postmodernism distrusts authority. At one time you may have been able to say, “This is a good value for this house,” and your buyer would simply trust your judgement. After all you are a professional. This is no longer the case. Now, multiple factors must go into making a decision: 1.) What does the data say? 2.) What does my agent say? 3.) What do my friends and spiritual advisor say? 4.) and lastly and most importantly, How do I feel about it?
– Truth is personal and it’s relative.There is market data, there are appraisals, there is the financial situation of the seller, and there are comparables; but none of this makes a bit of difference if the buyer doesn’t see the truth in them. Today’s buyer can’t be given the data and the data’s conclusion. They have to be given the data and make their own conclusion. To you the chicken farm next door might devalue the house by $10,000, but to the buyer it increases the value by $10,000. After all, they grew up on a chicken farm, and viewing one brings back fond memories.
– Postmodernism values community. It’s not just getting a good deal, but it’s meeting the seller of the house to learn about their kids and the experience they had in the home. It’s not just about advice from an agent, but its becoming friends with your agent. It’s not just about the lender, Read more
ActiveRain has accepted a minority capital investment from HouseValues designed to help us grow and become more of what we had always hoped we could be.
A great deal of thought and consideration went into this decision. I’d like to share some of that with you.
2007 taught us a few things. The biggest perhaps is how prudent we need to be about who we do business with. Despite the many hands held out to us over the past few months, the right one had to gain a firm grip on our trust. HouseValues did that – above all others.Financial terms were important to us, but throughout the entire process we continually asked ourselves “who understands us and our culture the best?” and “Who will help us keep our commitments to the community? HouseValues, a local company with a wealth of experience in our industry, hit the mark.
I’m not even going to remark on this…
Thanks to Cheryl Johnson for dropping a dime.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
We’re in Phoenix, which is a megalopolis. You can drive in a straight line in the Phoenix metropolitan area for two solid hours and never run out of metropolitan area.
But much of Arizona is not just rural but virtually devoid of people. Scrub desert, dry as dust, where a very few hard-scrabble folks try to scratch out a hard-scrabble living.
You can be on a lonely old road at night and not see a car in either direction. There are no street lights, since someone would have to build, pay for and maintain them. There are no lights at all, and you will never know what it feels like to be shipwrecked or stranded alone on the moon until you look in vain in every direction for any sign of the works of man.
And then, far off in the distance, there’s a light. Just a glint at first, but it seems to grow brighter as you draw nearer. You can drive toward a light like that for half an hour, so thick is the darkness. And then you’re upon it. And then, just like that, you’re past it.
What was it? An electric sign. For what? A lonely little cowboy roadhouse. And what did the sign say? “Dancing, Saturday Nights.”
That’s real life in the real desert.
Here’s a Reason.TV story about authorities in Pinal County trying to shut down a little desert road house — for the crime of allowing its patrons to dance outdoors.
There’s a bit of speculation in the video that calls to mind the Lincoln County War — but that’s a different desert in a different state…
Hat tip: Thomas Johnson.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
There are 15 entries on the short list this week, out of a long list of 82 posts. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.
Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.
Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:
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“Connie Brzowski — Mortgage Crisis The Mortgage Crisis Has a Silver Lining (and other truths you won’t hear on cable news this week)“,
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“Doug Quance — School Of Hard Knocks Tuition Is Expensive At The School Of Hard Knocks“,
“Drew Meyers — Neighborhood Boundary Files 7000+ Neighborhood Boundary Files in Shapefile Format“,
“Eric Blackwell — Network Solutions Network Solutions — I-CANN too hold your domain ideas hostage!“,
“Gary Elwood — Writing Why Writing Is the Most Important Thing You Can Learn“,
“Greg Tracy — Realtors are too Damn Old Realtors are Just too Damn Old“,
“Jim Cronin — Readers or Search Engines? Dichotomy of the Real Estate Blog – Do You Please the Readers or Search Engines?“,
“Kris Berg — Technology Hangover Technology Hangover – I’m a little fuzzy.“,
“Michael Wurzer — Seeking Clarity Seeking Clarity in Real Estate Data Standards“,
“Morgan Brown — A Fool’s Rally We’re looking at a fool’s rally – plain and simple.“,
“Chris Johnson — Economics of Wholesale Lending Some Economics of Wholesale Lending: Yet another Reason Why it’s a dead man walking.“,
“Stan Humphries — Zestimation What’s in a Number?“,
“Trevor Smith — Different Kind of Buyer Theology, Postmodernism, and a Different Kind of Buyer“,
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Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.
It might seem like I’m shouting up the drain pipe, but I’m not talking to Dustin — I’m talking to you.
If you were selling a viral product like Skype, where for every 10,000 people with a casual interest in your product, one will turn into a paying customer — with the cost per conversion approaching zero dollars — what Dustin is saying would make sense.
But selling real estate is a direct marketing problem. If 10,000 people exhibit a casual interest in your product, you will have earned nothing, whereas if one person actually buys, you will have earned a huge pay-check.
There’s more: If you are spending some significant fraction of your time servicing inquiries from people who will not be buying your product, you will have less time — possibly no time — to work with the small number of people who will buy your product — from someone else if not from you.
Your goal is not weblog traffic. Your goal is converted sales. This is not news. This is me, from last March:
“Traffic is not about traffic. Traffic is about conversions.”
If you get 3,000 unique hits every day and convert one a month, you are an emaciated wretch with huge bragging rights. If you get three unique hits a day and convert one a week, you are constantly trying and failing to make time between appointments to get your Lexus detailed. Your goal is not traffic. Your goal is not even community, although this is a vitally-important secondary objective. Your goal is not forms filled out or leads captured or phone calls returned or listings emailed or showings scheduled. Your goal is conversions, as represented by a fat check from a title company. It does not matter how many shots you take at the basket. What matters is how many times — and how often and how regularly — you get the ball through the cylinder.
I pointed out that the False Dichotomy of schmoozing with the homies versus counting flowers on the wall is a logical fallacy. Your objective is not to be tripped-upon by accident by any one of Read more
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Net-borne buyers create new burdens for listing agents
“Eighty percent of buyers start their home search on the internet.”
You don’t have to dig too deeply in the real estate world to unearth that statistic. There are two problems that I can see with the claim.
First, it’s based on an outrageously unreliable mail survey of recent home-buyers. Fewer than five percent of recipients returned the survey. How did the other 95% manage their home search? We don’t know.
Moreover, while the long-term trend, surely, is that more people are using the internet to shop for homes, what matters is not how they started their search, but, rather, how did they finish?
There’s more to think about, though, because it seems reasonable to me that people who are starting their home search without professional representation — without a Realtor — are continuing their search unrepresented as well.
What’s the implication? Like it or not, the listing Realtor’s responsibilities are increasing.
Realtors like to say — to each other — “If you list, you last.” What that means is that a listing, at least in a normal market, is a pretty secure paycheck, where working with buyers can be a lot riskier. This is the reason that the buyer’s Realtor often gets 60% or even 75% of the gross commission. The listing Realtor presumes that the buyer’s Realtor is going to be doing most of the heavy lifting.
But this is not as much the case in the age of the internet. If an unrepresented buyer clicks through to the listing Realtor from an on-line Realty.bot — or if that buyer simply makes a sign call — the listing Realtor is obliged to show the home, even if the original intent was to have buyer’s Realtors doing all the work. Moreover, the open house, long derided by Realtors, is suddenly much more important.
All of this creates new opportunities for dual agency, whereby the listing Realtor gets paid more — and incurs huge risks — while giving the buyer almost nothing in the way of representation. It’s hard to Read more
I’m engaged in a debate with Dustin Luther at his place, but the issues are important enough that I want to highlight some of my remarks here. The meta-issue: Is linking back and forth among real estate weblogs an effective marketing strategy for a consumer-focused, client-seeking real estate weblog, or do other marketing techniques offer greater promise of financial rewards?
Notably:
[S]earch engines are suboptimal as a source of traffic for niche-based, consumer-focused weblogs. They’re going to get their long-tail searches anyway, but search-engine borne visitors are loosely-motivated and rapidly-bouncing. The objective should be to build relationships with future clients and to forge alliances that will result in even more of those relationships. Done right, the weblog doesn’t need search engine traffic — and the practitioner is immune to competition.
Professionals learning from experts is a great idea, which is why BloodhoundBlog is what it is. Professionals chatting with each other, as with Active Rain, is more than anything a pleasant diversion, a plausibly harmless waste of time. Professionals sending their prospects off to BloodhoundBlog or 4realz is a poor marketing strategy.
I’m sorry, Dustin. You’re simply wrong about this. It is to my benefit that so many locally-focused and hyperlocal weblogs blogroll BloodhoundBlog. But it almost certainly is not to their interest, nor is the conversation among such weblogs, nor is the incestuous cronyism among the webloggers — at least not on those weblogs. Flying fish don’t actually fly, and there is no rational convergence between fish and fowl.
Inadvertently, this becomes a commercial for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. We won’t teach you how to have fun publicly noodging other weblogs from what should be your office on the internet, but we will show you how to run a commercial weblog as a business.
More:
The larger topic is interesting to me, though, so maybe I’ll write about it. There is an extent to which the RCG model does a disservice to the idea of real estate weblogging. I make a point of telling our readers that what BloodhoundBlog does is not what they should do. Many of the major RE.net weblogs are modeled on RCG to greater and Read more
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald]
brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.
Trulia.com is going into the Realtors-talking-to-each-other business…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology